“Take a look at your agency and if their tests keep losing and you’re like ‘oh our current ad keeps performing better’…you should have a real hard conversation…[You’re losing] every time they tested…”
Samir Balwani is a marketing thought leader, out-of-the-box thinker, and an intrinsic connector. As CEO and founder of QRY (pronounced “query”), Samir has built a world-class media agency of innovative thinkers and spirited doers who help brands think strategically about e-commerce growth and scale.
A true brand builder, Samir has over 15 years of professional experience as a marketing leader at American Express, StyleCaster, and Rogers & Cowan PMK (formerly PMK*BNC), to name a few.
His successes range from building and managing large scale media campaigns to creating tactical acquisition marketing strategies.
Samir has lectured at Barnard College and the Fashion Institute of Technology. He’s been quoted in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Inc., and has written for Mashable.
Questions and topics we covered include:
And more!
You can connect with Samir here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samirbalwani/
The article Samir mentioned, “THE FIVE STAGES OF DTC & E-COMMERCE ADVERTISING” – https://www.weareqry.com/insights/the-five-stages-of-e-commerce-advertising
And my favorite multi-touch attribution tool I’ve used to date is here (not a sponsored or affiliate link): https://www.attributionapp.com
Kenny Soto 0:00
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the People Digital Marketing podcast with your host, Kenny Soto, and today’s special guest, Samir Balwani. Hi, Samir, how are you?
Samir Balwani 0:15
I’m good. How about yourself?
Kenny Soto 0:16
I’m doing great. It’s 2023. And with that comes a lot of both exciting and scary changes in the world of both techs and digital marketing. Before we dive into that, I do want to ask you, my first introductory question is what I ask all guests, just so that the audience can get to know you better. And then we’ll dive into your expertise. So my first question for you is, how did you get into the world of digital marketing?
Samir Balwani 0:47
I can, I wish I could say it was intentional because that would be awesome. I got into digital marketing, honestly, in a really roundabout way. So when I was in college, I really wanted to be a software engineer, I realized software engineering was not for me, I was like, oh, man, I’ll be a lawyer, this will be great.
Realize that that was definitely not going to be great. I tried my hand at politics for a while and I realized that. Thankfully, I did not make that decision as we look at the world of politics right now. And the one thread that was through the political side that really got me excited was just talking to people and being persuasive, and getting people excited about things. And I realized that that was marketing at the end of the day.
And so digital marketing was blowing up Google Adsense, Google ads at the time, and Facebook was just becoming a really big thing. And so it became a really natural segue for me. Right out of college I started working at another agency, managing strategy for brands like LVMH, NEA, and Sundance and things like that. So I really jumped right into it pretty hard. I actually started a blog about digital marketing, what, 15 years ago now, which is how I got my first job, actually, interestingly enough, because I figured what better way to learn it than to actually just do it. Right.
Kenny Soto 2:13
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Let me ask you for another follow-up. If you had to convince someone who either just graduated college and studied a different area of expertise, or is thinking of switching to the career of digital marketer? How would you convince them that that is a good idea?
Samir Balwani 2:36
Here’s the thing, I will say, if I have to convince you, it’s probably not for you. And I think digital marketers are a breed of their own. They’re passionate. They’re excited about problem-solving. They’re really an even match between analytical and creative. It’s a really unique mindset.
And it’s funny because at Curry, one of our core values is our first core value is to be curious and to always ask questions. And I think that that’s what makes a good digital marketer is, you know, the space is constantly changing, things are constantly new, that people that really just want to be at the forefront of things end up being really good at Digital Marketing.
Kenny Soto 3:20
What is a query? And what do you do there?
Samir Balwani 3:22
Yeah, so the query is a paid media agency for econ brands. So we specifically target high growth econ brands, so someone that’s really trying to scale their brand, usually eight figures plus in online revenue, and really want to make a difference. Our mission is to help grow tomorrow’s most popular brands. And so that’s what we get excited about. That’s what we do. My role I’m founder and CEO of It started about three years ago and have just been spectacularly growing with our brands.
Kenny Soto 3:55
So let’s dive into growth. What are some common mistakes that hold back brands from scaling their ads?
Samir Balwani 4:02
Yeah, it’s really interesting that you asked that question, because it’s, a lot of times what you’ll hear a lot, a lot of subject matter experts are a lot of talking heads talk about what is like, Oh, you’re using Facebook wrong, or Oh, you’re using Tiktok wrong, or you haven’t activated the right channels. And, you know, from our perspective, we try and look at things a little bit more strategically and channel agnostic.
So when you talk about what holds back brands from scaling their media spin, and again, a reminder on where we are, in the spectrum, we’re talking about brands that have already identified product market fit, they know who their customer is, they know their customer wants their product, they’re able to sell their past the initial level of brand awareness. We actually have an article on this called the five stages of advertising growth.
And so you know, stage one and stage two are just around building that baseline business and like having a growing business. So when I Talk about scaling. Usually, you’re on stage three, you’ve kind of done all of this simple advertising stuff, you’ve got some press, you’ve got some influencers that are talking about, you know, people kind of know who you are in your niche, and you’re able to sell to them.
But now it’s like, Alright, how do I get Joe Schmoe in the middle of nowhere to really want my product, and then tell everybody else about my product as well? And that’s, that’s where
people start to struggle. So we talked about having a few tools in place that will allow you to scale your media spend. So one, full-funnel advertising approach, brand awareness, all the way down to drive in consideration, which is I am comparing your product or your brand against other things.
Why do I want your product over others? And then finally, conversion? What is that final push that gets me to purchase channels, creative messaging, and budgets, all changing at each different set? And so making sure that you’re looking at it from a perspective of that is really important.
Secondly, Omni channel advertising approaches. Don’t look at just Facebook, don’t look at just Tik Tok. The world of advertising arbitrage has ended. And you’re not going to spend $30 on Facebook and make $100. Overnight anymore like that, that world has quickly ended. It’s really an investment in brand building and being able to do things, recognizing their customers and consumers or just going from Facebook, on their phone to googling you on their desktop to you know, watching a video about you on YouTube.
And being omnipresent everywhere is really important. We also talked about sophisticated media planning and forecasting, that’s another really important piece. $1 today may not be worth $1 Tomorrow, because you need to manage demand appropriately. So if I spend your entire annual budget in the next six months, and then we’ve got to be quiet for six months, that’s not really the best safe place. Also, you know, a perfect example of this is what a lot of brands forget. So we start holiday planning in June.
Why do we start Q4 Holiday planning in June because we know that we have to be prospecting for new audiences in September and October if we want to convert them in November and December, which means your brand needs to be thinking about creative offers and product sets before September. So now we’re talking about July and August.
And so being able to plan all that out and be really sophisticated in where the budget is going, how we’re maximizing budget. And what we’re going to forecast our returns are going to be is really important. If you’re going to scale, you need to know where you’re going and what your goal is. Another element is ad tracking and attribution.
So what is the value of the dollar that you’re spending, you’re going to hear a lot about ad tracking and attribution. It is continuing to be a conversation, everything from Google Analytics for tracking, to Facebook and Google ads for tracking tools like multi-touch attribution, which try and give you an understanding of how all of your channels are working together. And then there’s marketing mix modeling, which is more of like, an algorithmic way of trying to figure out what your best makeup is going to be.
But really thinking through what your ad tracking attribution process is going to be is important, because you need to know if I spend an extra dollar actually getting $2 back, where am I just spending an extra dollar? And then the last piece that we do that’s really important is what’s your experimentation plan or your learning agenda? What are you trying to learn to help push your campaigns forward? If you’re iterating on things, and thoughtfully, iterating, don’t just test for testing’s sake, I, every time someone’s like, Oh, should we test the button color? I get so frustrated about that, because I’m like, what are we trying to solve here? So it’s like, and this ties back to your media planner forecast.
If you have a really sophisticated plan, and you look at your click-through rates on your ad or allow meaning people aren’t clicking on your ads as well. Well, then now you know where to test. Now you know what to test because you’re not at the forecast, you’re not what you expected. So we have to try and improve the click-through rate.
So maybe we’re creative testing or testing a new audience or trying a new offer. But now you’ve kind of figured out what you’re focused on and what’s actually going to impact it. So those are kind of the things that we really want to have in place for our brands to kind of build that process and that knowledge to be able to scale spend.
Kenny Soto 9:41
I know that there’s the adoption of the full funnel, paid media strategy, but I’ve also heard pushback in the past where not necessary for consideration, but more so for brand awareness, making that organic only and not Alec Hitting, spend, or even like, a large portion as compared to consideration and conversion. If someone were to propose this to you, how would you push back and say that brand awareness should be also considered in paid media spending?
Samir Balwani 10:17
Yeah, I think it’s. So it is crucial for paid media spend, especially if you want to scale. Because if you don’t build new audiences, your current audiences are gonna degrade over time, and they’re going to attract, you’re going to turn more customers to competitors, then you will gain. Also, if you’re not growing brand awareness, from a media perspective, you cap your ability to grow just on organic growth only then.
So your ability to scale is just entirely focused on your ability to organically increase the volume around the brand. And that seems like such a missed opportunity. And you know, when we talk about awareness, we’re not only talking about digital awareness, because there are things like out-of-home or linear TV, direct mail, things like that are really valuable and should be looked at in your media mix, and your marketing channels.
An influencer is brand awareness, and celebrity endorsement is another apparent awareness, but like, these are the kinds of things that you ultimately need to introduce the brand to new people. Because if you don’t have brand demand, how are you going to capture it? Right? Like, there is gonna be one of the same. We talked about this. And we’ve run this test a bunch of times where brands have cut back on awareness spend.
And we’ll tell them like, our ability to spend our consideration and conversion budgets, you’ve got about 30 to 60 days on it. After that, we’re going to start to see a decline, we’re just not going to hit our budgets, or we’re going to start to see reductions in return on ad spend. because invariably, some of our budgets going to have to be spent on brand awareness to introduce it, to tomorrow’s audience. So, you know, somehow we’ve got to get to introduce the brand to new people.
Kenny Soto 12:12
How should media buyers go about AD testing this year?
Samir Balwani 12:17
Yeah. So ad testing is definitely really interesting. And so, I am of the mind that ad testing needs to be very strategic, versus shortcomings. And so, you know, sometimes we’ll hear people be like, oh, yeah, we tested 50 ads in 50 days, and I’m like, Okay, but what did you learn? Like, what was the outcome of it? And, you know, they’ll be like, Oh, we had this one ad perform really well.
So we ran that on Facebook all day long. I was like, Okay, well, did you run that? And was that message the same as what you rank in Google? Or like, did somebody think that the brand was two brands because they saw one message on Facebook, and another message on Google, and another message and Tik Tok because you AV tested, and each channel had something very different than one. And so I think ad testing it, there is value in AD testing, obviously, we are built around testing, and I think the idea of recognizing what you are testing and why is important.
And then also having barriers is important. So when you create testing, you need to understand here is our campaign creative, meaning this is what we’re talking about across all of our channels. And we’re going to AB test within this conversation. That way, the brand still appears as a single brand and doesn’t look like it has multiple personality disorders as it comes across in different ways. So I think that that’s one. So just being very thoughtful in terms of how you’re testing and what you’re testing.
And then going back to the don’t test everything there. The one thing that people forget is there is a cost to testing things. So you should have some level of confidence in what you’re testing. Because there are creative costs. Someone has to build a creative there is traffic and cost someone has to traffic an ad. And there is a cost in terms of if the ad you were testing performed worse than your existing creative, there was an opportunity cost because you lost sales in that test.
So making sure that you are testing, when you have high confidence in wins is really important. And hey brands, take a look at your agency. And if their tests keep losing and you’re like, Oh, our current ad keeps performing better. You should have a really hard conversation with them because then maybe it’s not worth testing anymore, because you did lose every time they tested them.
Kenny Soto 14:49
Can you do a brief explanation of what a row is and explain why a high row is sometimes a bad thing?
Samir Balwani 14:59
Yeah, so roses return on ad spend. So it’s how much money you make for how much money to spend. And Jairo’s eyes are not always a good thing. And the impetus of this was the number of agencies out there that would talk about their 20x Return On Facebook ads being 30x, return on Tiktok ads. And it’s a really cool headline. And listen, as a brand owner, I will be like, oh, man, look at that profitability.
But as a marketer, trying to scale brands, I look at that as a missed opportunity. Because what you’re trying to tell me is that you only focused on the bottom of the funnel, people that were ready to purchase, and you maximize your ad spend there. But you didn’t convert anyone, or reach anyone that was somewhat interested or comparing me against competitors, or all the way out and brand awareness, they’re a cold audience, and I’m good for tomorrow.
So the joke I have with my team is you give me a brand, and I can get you 100x return for one day. That’s easy. Trying to scale a brand by 50% over a year. That’s hard. Come back to me when you can do that. And so that’s the area where it’s, you know, let’s figure that piece out. And weigh in the way we manage against that is through our role as targets.
So we’ll work with our clients to figure out, hey, what’s your breakeven return on ad spend? What is the amount of return on ad spend that you need to just break even on the sales, right? Some of our brands will put those margins directly into our reporting platform, we’re able to manage all of that from that perspective.
But our goal is, let’s balance brand awareness spending with our performance spend. So that way, we’ve created this flywheel where our profits from the performance are helping fuel our brand awareness, and we’re continuing to grow top-line revenue. Because you can always come back to us and say, Hey, I actually need to have some profitability in this 10% profitability, 20% profitability great.
And just the angle of that limb line just changes the speed at which we introduce a brand to new audiences that we then convert later on, just changes. And so when we see really high-rise campaigns, we know that they’re probably flat, or kind of up a little bit, when we see lower campaigns that have like growing top-line revenue. That means that they’re good messaging, they’re targeting the right audiences, and they’re converting them to the right place. That’s what we want to see. That’s a healthy growing brand.
Kenny Soto 17:37
You mentioned this earlier, but if possible, can you explain why revenue forecasting is necessary for consumer brands?
Samir Balwani 17:47
Yeah, I think revenue forecasting, especially in E-commerce is really important. There are a few reasons why so the thing that will kill most econ businesses is cash flow management, buying the right amount of inventory that you know you will sell through, meaning that you’ve got to outlay a lot of cash to have inventory. And then you want to make sure that you have confidence on when you’ll be able to sell all that inventory.
Kenny Soto 18:17
My, I’m sorry to interrupt, but my mentor once told me he used to handle textiles. He said the biggest bane of his existence was overhead. Yeah, he hated it.
Samir Balwani 18:28
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you just don’t want to have leftover stuff. And you don’t want to have inventory costs like holding on to inventory. So having really good forecasting, and planning is important. As an agency, we will generally drive about 40% of our client’s revenue. So from a media perspective, we already know that we’re going to be a pretty large driver, and honestly, probably the largest single driver of revenue for them, right?
So we take it really seriously in terms of what we are going to sell. How are we gonna sell it? What’s it look like? What are our revenue targets gonna look like? And we help our brands really think through their demand planning because it’s important that they know how much revenue is going to go out the door every month, so that way they can manage their cash flow, and they can manage what inventory to buy, when to buy inventory, when it’s going to hit the, you know, hit their warehouse, how long they’re gonna hold it for.
So that’s one reason why it’s really important. There are a few reasons why immediate planning and forecasts are really important. So immediate forecasts just kind of step back and say what we put in the media forecast. Your media forecast should be spent by channel broken out by month, and then at a baseline, right, like let’s just start there.
You should have that. Ours goes a lot deeper in that we do it. Customer stage means here’s how we’re spending on brand awareness, consideration conversion, spend revenue row as and then all the supporting metrics behind it, CPM click-through rate, CPC all of that.
Because for us that forecast should kind of be your holy grail if we’re missing the forecast. This is the channel that’s not performing well, this is the mark, this is the KPI that’s not performing well, great, we know what to do. Without that, you’re kind of just shooting in the dark, you don’t really know what you’re going to be doing.
You don’t know how to fix things if you’re all forecast. And I’ll be honest, we don’t always hit like, our forecasts are not perfect. We still were, as I like to say, telling the future, if we could tell the future all the time, we would just play the lottery, like we wouldn’t be doing this.
So I think it’s just making sure we get as close as we can. Revising and being really iterative on our forecasts is really important. So that’s what we do. Forecasts are really important because they give you attainable goals and the budgets you need to hit them, we can look at your past data and be able to look Hey, you know, you come to us and say, Samir, I need to hit 10 million in revenue, you’ve got $4 million in the budget, go, I’m going to look at what you did last year, I’m gonna look at what you did the year before.
And if you hit 4 million in revenue, and only had 4 million in the budget, it’d be like, Hey, I don’t think this is gonna work, I think we’re gonna need some more money. So at least we can have that real, very honest conversation early on. It also allows us to maximize budgets, kind of what I spoke about earlier on, dollars are not equal in every world every day.
So make sure that you’re positioning money at the right times to kind of match demand, right? And ultimately, is really a roadmap for success in diagnosing problems, we really want to know where CPMs are click-through rate CPC is by customer stage, and all of that so that we can maximize it. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Kenny Soto 21:50
How do you incorporate an account for unexpected events and external factors when you’re doing these forecasts?
Samir Balwani 21:57
Yeah, so we will forecast so we will revise forecasts every month. Right? So we’ll do we’re actually going through this right now we’re doing all of our annual forecasts. And it’s January as we tape this. So doing all of our annual forecasts right now. And then we’ll wind up happening is, you know, February, I’ll come along, we’ll have a new data set, we’ll review the data go from there.
March will come along, we’ll have a new data set, and go from there. Usually every quarter, we’re doing a full re-forecast where we’re kind of reviewing the data. But for the most part, it doesn’t change too drastically. What actually impacts our forecast more often than not, is the effectiveness of other channels. Because let’s say a wholesale partner doesn’t do as well, that has impacts on our brand awareness and our ability to scale as well.
Let’s say an influencer engagement or a marketing event falls through, well, then we had planned for that in demand planning, then we have to forecast some lag. COVID was like a whole thing, supply chain was a whole thing. I’m hoping we don’t have any more of those. But, you know, again, like forecasting is an ever-moving target. For sure.
Kenny Soto 23:14
What is one marketing challenge you expect? Most, if not all of your clients to face this year?
Samir Balwani 23:24
Oh, man, I think I don’t know that it’s a challenge. But it’s going to be a conversation. marketing attribution will absolutely be a conversation that we end up having with every single one of our clients. And here’s the thing that I think is really important. We’re gonna end up having a conversation with every single one of our clients. The conversation, from my perspective, needs to revolve around, do we need it? When do we need it?
And how much do we invest in it? Because, again, just like I said, there’s a cost to testing, there’s a cost to collecting data, and there’s a cost to actually reviewing that data. So unless you’re going to use it, and it’s going to impact you in a meaningful way. It’s almost not like you’ve got it, you got to figure out what those budgets are. For most of our clients that are spending more than $100,000 a month on advertising, it’ll be worthwhile.
I think you know, generally, that’s the threshold where we would say yes, you know, you have full Omni channel, full-funnel campaigns in place. We really do want to make sure that everything kind of fits together under that, maybe not really depending on your need for that level of clarity.
Kenny Soto 24:39
What are some of your favorite marketing tools?
Samir Balwani 24:43
Oh man, marketing tools. I am a sucker for sem rush. And I like to find myself in that just like randomly looking up things. I’m always curious about that. I also use HubSpot for all of our agents. See stuff, which is kind of cool. I think they’ve done such a phenomenal job. It’s interesting because like, none of our brands use it on the income side as we use it for the agency itself. And so that’s, that’s been a lot of fun to actually understand and use. And it’s so much more powerful than people realize. And it’s kind of cool to play around with.
Kenny Soto 25:18
Samir, my last question for you is hypothetical because time machines do not exist. But if one did and you can go back in time, about 10 years in the past, knowing everything you know, right now, how would you specifically accelerate the speed of your career?
Samir Balwani 25:36
Transparently, I feel like my career has actually been very fast. And I don’t know that I want it to be faster, to be honest, I can tell you that there are a few things that I did that really accelerated my career. And so I’ll kind of pivot that question a little bit. So, starting a blog and becoming a creator was probably the most valuable thing I did. And the reason why is that it allowed me to network with people that I should not have had access to right out of college, right? Like,
Kenny Soto 26:06
Like what we’re doing right now.
Samir Balwani 26:08
Like literally what we’re doing right now. It’s just, it shows passion. It’s really exciting. And honestly, it’s just fun. Like, you’re Can you tell me if have you not learned more from doing this than anything else,
Kenny Soto 26:21
I feel like, there’s this concept about the T-shaped marketer, right, there are two ways you can achieve it. One is you have your nine-to-five. And then your side hustle is like you’re a freelancer that does everything under the sun. Or you can have your nine-to-five, have your specialty, and do a podcast like this, where I don’t need to be an expert in media planning, email marketing, or sales. In certain instances, I can just speak to experts who know those things and just retain that information for conversations that helped me better understand what’s going on in my nine-to-five, it’s like the perfect combination. Yeah.
Samir Balwani 26:56
And honestly, as a hiring manager and owner of a business, that’s the kind of person I want to hire. I actually don’t want to hire a deep subject matter expert, because you’re, especially in our industry, a subject matter expert on a subject that exists today. It may not exist tomorrow, the person that gets me really excited is somebody that really wants to learn, excited to go and learn, not afraid to reach out to somebody to ask a question.
And like, not afraid to email a random person and ask them like, like, I love that. And that’s the stuff that gets me really excited. It’s interesting. When we do interviews, I always ask this question to my team. As they listen to this, they’re gonna laugh because I always ask this one question. That’s what you learn new, and teach it to me, and I just want to hear everything.
And I have learned so much stuff from everything on why it’s called knots, for boating to how to run properly, and I like it. I just love it. And those team members are awesome. And they’re gonna laugh when they hear this. And like, that’s the kind of stuff that gets me really excited, because that’s honestly what makes a good marketer, and a great like a consultant and an expert, someone that’s just excited to learn something new, and peel back and just understand something different.
Kenny Soto 28:13
Yeah, and to add to what you’re saying because as you’re saying, I’m reflecting at the same time, I feel like in marketing, but now in business, especially like with the emergence of GPT, three, and all this craziness that’s happening around that curiosity, as a skill is like a number one thing because at the end of the day if you want true job security, you need to be the most useful person in the room, your salary is a budget item.
And to justify it, you have to be the most curious person that leads you to be the most useful person, if you cannot do that, your job security is a little wonky. That’s what I was thinking when you’re giving it.
Samir Balwani 28:55
You can’t, you can’t kind of rest on your laurels. It’s really You gotta love learning and be excited to go out and learn. And, honestly, if to be ambitious about learning, you have to want to do it on your own. And I think that that’s the thing. It’s like, you know, as an agency owner, I can help with the baseline stuff like a Facebook blueprint, Google ads, certifications, basic marketing classes on LinkedIn stuff.
That’s all the stuff I know. Right? I’m kind of counting on our strategists and marketers on the team to help me with this stuff. I don’t know. Like, we have an employee or team member who has been doing AI paintings, right, like doing all the artificial intelligence painting stuff, and I’m so excited to just sit down with him and learn how he’s doing it.
But like, that’s the kinds of stuff like, I don’t know how it’s going to be applicable to what we do yet, but maybe it will be. And so, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that I think is really important for marketers is really wanting to go above and beyond and go explore all of these things. You may not know how it’s relevant, just right now, but it may come to be No one knows how to chat GPT is going to turn into and shake up the marketing world. But it probably will.
Kenny Soto 30:07
Samir, if anyone wants to say hello online, where can they find you?
Samir Balwani 30:10
Yeah, so check us out. So one, find me on LinkedIn, Samir Balwani. Connect with me, I will connect back always. We are try.com for our website. If you want to be a client book a strategy call, that’s easy. If you want to join the team, we are hiring, check out our careers page. We’re almost always hiring a pianist. So definitely check out our careers page, we are growing pretty fast. So I’d say that’s the best place to start. Can you also give me some articles to put in show notes for sure? And that’s probably the best way to get in touch with us.
Kenny Soto 30:44
Awesome. Thanks again for your time today. And thank you to your listener for listening to another episode of the people Digital Marketing podcast. And please, if possible, rate us on whatever podcasting app you’re listening to this on. That’s how we discover or excuse me, that’s how this podcast gets discovered by more and more listeners like yourself, and as always, I hope everyone has a great day.
Bye.